John Okada

John Okada (September 23, 1923 – February 20, 1971) was a Japanese-American writer, considered the first novelist of this ethnic group. Born in Seattle, Washington, he was a student at the University of Washington when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He had to interrupt his studies, and Okada and his family were among thousands of citizens interned at Minidoka in 1942. Hundreds of thousands more Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans from the West Coast were interned at other camps built in the interior of the United States.

Okada was released from internment when he volunteered to enlist in the Army. He served as a Japanese translator in the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), overflying Japanese forces in the Pacific and translating intercepted Japanese communications.[1]

After the war, he returned to college, earning two bachelor's degrees from the University of Washington and a master's degree from Columbia University. In 1956, Okada completed the manuscript for the novel No-No Boy and it was published that year.[2] He worked as a teacher and then as a technical writer for an engineering firm.

Contents

Okada's only completed and published novel, No-No Boy (1956), deals with the aftermath of the Japanese American internment during World War II, Japanese-American identity, and how this event divided the Japanese American population after the war. He explored feelings among Japanese nationals, some of whom still held dreams of a return to Japan, and among their native-born American children, who felt conflicted about their identity but identified with the United States. Some of both generations were intensely bitter about their treatment in being interned during the war, in addition to the substantial economic and social losses they had suffered.[4]

The protagonist is a native Japanese American who answered "No" on two important questions posed by the government: would he vow loyalty and would he enlist in the Army? Those who answered "no" were sentenced to two years in prison. On returning to Seattle after prison, he has to confront veterans whom he knew from before the war, some of whom were wounded and all of whom look down on him. He also struggles with his parents, as his mother clings to the belief that Japan did not lose the war and eventually loses her sanity.

The novel did not get much notice, coming too soon after the war for people to want to explore the harshness of his portrayal and confrontation with hard questions. Okada's novel was rediscovered by some writers from Los Angeles in 1976, who tracked down his wife to meet her and see if she had any of his manuscripts. She had struggled after his death and, unable to find a publisher interested in his next manuscript and disappointed at the rejection of his papers by UCLA, she burned everything: novel, notes, letters, etc.

Dorothy is a truly wonderful person. It hurt to have her tell us that "John would have liked you." It hurt to have her tell us that "you two are the first ones who ever came to see him about his work." It hurt to have her tell us that she recently burned his "other novel about the Issei, which we both researched and which was almost finished." It hurt to have her tell us that "the people I tried to contact about it never answered so when I moved I burned it, because I have him in my heart." [...] You could say John was "ahead of his time," that he was born too early and died too young.

"English as a Postcolonial Tool" By: Eoyang, Eugene Chen; English Today: The International Review of the English Language, 2003 Oct; 19 (4 [76]): 23-29. (journal article)

"The Mother That Won't Reflect Back: Situating Psychoanalysis and the Japanese Mother in No-No Boy" By: Gribben, Bryn; MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2003 Summer; 28 (2): 31-46. (journal article)